I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m doing my thing with adopting a permanent exercise and diet regimen. (Who isn’t?) This program has evolved. Starting back in July 2009 I wanted to get on a self-improvement track. At the same time I was getting interested in what I think is a very significant trend: health 2.0, participatory medicine, e-medicine or whatever else people are calling it.

I started by setting up accounts in both Google Health and HealthVault. Neither is very suitable for what I wanted to do: keep track of my exercise and diet. Both are designed to enable people to set up computer accessible versions of the records their doctor or health provider has. Fortunately I’ve been in good health most of my life, and I don’t have any complicated records of disease episodes or conditions to put in there — even if I wanted to. I say “if I wanted to” because it became apparent that getting records into these PHR (personal health record) systems either requires hooking-up with a limited number of providers, using go-betweens, or just getting your paper records and manually transferring everything in. It didn’t seem worth it in my case.

However, I discovered that HealthVault offers the option of linking your medical records account up to the MSN Health & Fitness site. Health & Fitness is specifically for recording exercise and food consumption. The data and graphs are then accessible in HealthVault.

Good idea, I thought, so I started recording what I was doing in the fitness form. The Health & Fitness recording system calls for you to make a daily exercise and diet plan. Then you keep track of what you actually eat and do for exercise that day and enter it at day’s end. The program then compares your goals with what you really did. That was a problem for me because I never know what I’m going to eat, and I wasn’t embarking on such a controlled diet routine that I was going to control it by, say, preparing and packing my lunch to the office. So, for me, the food consumption planning was useless.

Also, the interface for diet planning and recording is poor. You can search for a food or drink and select from alphabetical drop-down menus. But no matter how many times you have the same thing there’s no way to get a shortcut to your commonly consumed items. Finally, the exercise planning and recording is set up around running or gym workouts. All I wanted to focus on was walking. Believe me, I’m way beyond the six-pack-abs stage.

After about three or four days I realized this wasn’t going to be something I wanted to do for weeks much less years. There was way too much “paperwork” involved through an interface that wasn’t very helpful. Indeed, I ran smack into what I think is a very common obstacle for getting people engaged with health routines: doing the manual labor of keeping track of your progress. There are notorious hurdles in the way of people keeping up sustained health routines, and this is a big one.

I realized pretty quickly that I needed a better way of gathering my data. Coincidentally my cell phone contract was up for renewal, and I latched on to what I hoped (or rationalized) would be a big step forward in convenience of recordkeeping: the iPhone. That was the next phase on my self-tracking saga, and I’ll go into using a smartphone in more detail in the next installment.